Sky Yaeger makes it big in bicycles

You never know when you might turn a corner and find yourself face-to-face with someone you haven't seen for five or 10 years or more. Half a lifetime ago, this sort of thing happened to me with enough regularity that I almost came to expect it. If it happens less often now at street level, the incidence multiplies by several orders of magnitude when you turn corners online.

It just happened again. I rounded a corner and found Sky Yaeger -- a name that might be familiar to you if you lived in Madison in the mid-1970s, or patronized Yellow Jersey around that time, or like Yaeger were studying art at UW-Madison back then. I didn't know Yaeger, but I knew of her, and on the chance that you knew her or of her, you might care to know that the former Madison resident has gone on to distinguish herself in the bicycle industry.

An interview published Wednesday on BikeRadar.com charts her ascent. Conducted by Gary Boulanger, it is rich in short anecdotal nuggets spanning her time in Madison through her tenure as Bianchi USA product manager from 1990-2006 to her current post as director sportif for Swobo -- a small California-based bicycle apparel firm for which Yaeger has designed and launched a line of bicycles.

Among the interview's gems for long-time Madison cyclists: Yaeger's recollections of working at Yellow Jersey when it was, in her words, "a hippy-dippy co-op" and of learning from Yellow Jersey's Andy Muzi both a customer-focused philosophy regarding repairs and "how to re-build a Sturmey-Archer 3-speed hub."